A joke is a short story or ironic depiction of a situation communicated with the intent of being humorous. These jokes will normally have a punch line that will end the sentence to make it humorous. A joke can also be a single phrase or statement, such as with sarcasm. Joke can also be used as a slang term for a person or thing which is not taken seriously by others in general or is known as being a failure. A practical joke or prank differs from a spoken one in that the major component of the humour is physical rather than verbal (for example placing salt in the sugar bowl).
Joke Ex.: What do you call a fish with no eyes?
A: A FSH

Jokes are typically for the entertainment of friends and onlookers. The desired response is generally laughter; when this does not happen the joke is said to have "fallen flat".

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In 1975 anthropologistMary Douglas noted that "Joking as one mode of expression has yet to be interpreted in its total relation to other modes of expression";[1] scholar Seth Graham remarked that 30 years later this statement remains largely valid.[2][3]

Why we laugh has been the subject of serious academic study, examples being:

Immanuel Kant, in Critique of Judgement (1790) states that "Laughter is an effect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into nothing." Here is Kant's 217-year old joke and his analysis:

"An Englishman at an Indian's table in Surat saw a bottle of ale being opened, and all the beer, turned to froth, rushed out. The Indian, by repeated exclamations, showed his great amazement. - Well, what's so amazing in that? asked the Englishman. - Oh, but I'm not amazed at its coming out, replied the Indian, but how you managed to get it all in. - This makes us laugh, and it gives us a hearty pleasure. This is not because, say, we think we are smarter than this ignorant man, nor are we laughing at anything else here that it is our liking and that we noticed through our understanding. It is rather that we had a tense expectation that suddenly vanished..."

Henri Bergson, in his book Le rire (Laughter, 1901), suggests that laughter evolved to make social life possible for human beings.

Marvin Minsky suggests that laughter has a specific function related to the human brain. In his opinion jokes and laughter are mechanisms for the brain to learn nonsense. For that reason, he argues, jokes are usually not as funny when you hear them repeatedly.

Edward de Bono in "The Mechanism of the Mind" (1969) and "I am Right, You are Wrong" (1990).

Edward de Bono suggests that the mind is a pattern-matching machine, and that it works by recognizing stories and behaviour and putting them into familiar patterns. When a familiar connection is disrupted and an alternative unexpected new link is made in the brain via a different route than expected, then laughter occurs as the new connection is made. This theory explains a lot about jokes. For example:

Why jokes are only funny the first time they are told: once they are told the pattern is already there, so there can be no new connections, and so no laughter.

Why jokes have an elaborate and often repetitive set up: The repetition establishes the familiar pattern in the brain. A common method used in jokes is to tell almost the same story twice and then deliver the punch line the third time the story is told. The first two tellings of the story evoke a familiar pattern in the brain, thus priming the brain for the punch line.

Why jokes often rely on stereotypes: the use of a stereotype links to familiar expected behaviour, thus saving time in the set-up.

Why jokes are variants on well-known stories (eg the genie and a lamp and a man walks into a bar): This again saves time in the set up and establishes a familiar pattern.

The rules of humour are analogous to those of poetry. These common rules are mainly precision, synthesis and rhythm. French philosopher Henri Bergson has said in an essay: "In every wit there is something of a poet."[4] In this essay Bergson views the essence of humour as the encrustation of the mechanical upon the living. He used as an instance a book by an English humourist, in which an elderly woman who desired a reputation as a philanthropist provided "homes within easy hail of her mansion for the conversion of atheists who have been specially manufactured for her, so to speak, and for a number of honest folk who have been made into drunkards so that she may cure them of their failing, etc." This idea seems funny because a genuine impulse of charity as a living, vital impulse has become encrusted by a mechanical conception of how it should manifest itself.

To reach precision, the comedian must choose the words in order to provide a vivid, in focus image, and to avoid being generic as to confuse the audience, and provide no laughter.
To properly arrange the words in the sentence is also crucial to get precision. An example by Woody Allen (from Side Effects, "A Giant Step for Mankind" story [2]):

“

Grasping the mouse firmly by the tail, I snapped it like a small whip, and the morsel of cheese came loose.

As Shakespeare said in Hamlet, "Brevity is the soul of wit".[5] Meaning that a joke is best when it expresses the maximum level of humour with a minimal number of words; this is today considered one of the key technical elements of a joke. An example from Woody Allen:

“

I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

”

Though, the familiarity of the pattern of "brevity" has led to numerous examples of jokes where the very length is itself the pattern breaking "punchline". Numerous examples from Monty Python exist, for instance, the song "I Like Traffic Lights", and more modernly, Family Guy contains numerous such examples, most notably, in the episode Wasted Talent, Peter Griffin bangs his shin, a classic slapstick routine, and tenderly nurses it whilst inhaling and exhaling to quiet the pain. This goes on for considerably longer than expected. Certain versions of the popular vaudevillian joke The Aristocrats can go on for several minutes, and it is considered an anti-joke, as the humor is more in the set-up than the punchline.

The joke's content (meaning) is not what provokes the laugh, it just makes the salience of the joke and provokes a smile. What makes us laugh is the joke mechanism. Milton Berle demonstrated this with a classic theater experiment in the 1950s: if during a series of jokes you insert phrases that are not jokes, but with the same rhythm, the audience laughs anyway. A classic is the ternary rhythm, with three beats: introduction, premise, antithesis (with the antithesis being the punch line).

In regards to the Milton Berle experiment, they can be taken to demonstrate the concept of "breaking context" or "breaking the pattern". It is not necessarily the rhythm that caused the audience to laugh, but the disparity between the expectation of a "joke" and being instead given a non-sequitur "normal phrase." This normal phrase is, itself, unexpected, and a type of punchline.

When a technically good joke is referred changing it with paraphrasing, it is not laughable any more; this is because the paraphrase, changing some term or moving it within the sentence, breaks the joke mechanism (its vividness, brevity and rhythm), and its power and effectiveness are lost. Douglas Adams described sentences where the joke word is the final word as "comically weighted." This saves the "payoff" until the last possible moment, allowing the expectation for surprise to reach its highest point, while the mind is more firmly rooted in the pattern established by the rest of the sentence. [How to reference and link to summary or text]

In the comic field plays the 'economy of ideative expenditure'; in other words excessive energy is wasted or action-essential energy is saved. The profound meaning of a comic gag or a comic joke is "I'm a child"; the comic deals with the clumsy body of the child.

Laurel and Hardy are a classic example. An individual laughs because he recognizes the child that is in himself. In clowns stumbling is a childish tempo. In the comic, the visual gags may be translated into a joke. For example in Side Effects (By Destiny Denied story) by Woody Allen:

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"My father used to wear loafers," she confessed. "Both on the same foot".

In the wit field plays the "economy of censorship expenditure"[6](Freud literally calls it "the economy of psychic expenditure".); usually censorship prevents some 'dangerous ideas' from reaching the conscious mind, or helps us avoid saying everything that comes to mind; adversely, the wit circumvents the censorship and brings up those ideas. Different wit techniques allow one to express them in a funny way. The profound meaning behind a wit joke is "I have dangerous ideas". An example from Woody Allen:

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I contemplated suicide again - this time by inhaling next to an insurance salesman.

”

Or, when a bagpipe player was asked "how do you play that thing," his answer was:

“

Well.

”

Wit is a branch of rhetoric, and there are about 200 techniques (technically they are called tropes, a particular kind of figure of speech) that can be used to make jokes.[7]

In the comedy field, humour induces an "economized expenditure of emotion" (Freud literally calls it "economy of affect" or "economy of sympathy". Freud produced this final part of his interpretation many years later, in a paper later supplemented to the book.).[6][8] In other words, the joke erases an emotion that should be felt about an event, making us insensitive to it.e.g: "yo momma" jokes. The profound meaning of the void feeling of a humour joke is "I'm a cynic". An example from Woody Allen:

“

Three times I've been mistaken for Robert Redford. Each time by a blind person.

”

This field of jokes is still a grey area, being mostly unexplored. Extensive use of this kind of humour can be found in the work of British satirist Chris Morris, like the sketches of the Jam television program.

Folklorists, in particular (but not exclusively) those who study the folklore of the United States, collect jokes into joke cycles. A cycle is a collection of jokes with a particular theme or a particular "script". (That is, it is a literature cycle.)[9] Folklorists have identified several such cycles:

Gruner discusses several "sick joke" cycles that occurred upon events surrounding Gary Hart, Natalie Wood, Vic Morrow, Jim Bakker, Richard Pryor, and Michael Jackson, noting how several jokes were recycled from one cycle to the next. For example: A joke about Vic Morrow ("We now know that Vic Morrow had dandruff: they found his head and shoulders in the bushes") was subsequently recycled about Admiral Mountbatten after his murder by Irish Republican terrorists in 1980, and again applied to the crew of the Challenger space shuttle ("How do we know that Christa McAuliffe had dandruff? They found her head and shoulders on the beach.").[25]

Berger asserts that "whenever there is a popular joke cycle, there generally is some widespread kind of social and cultural anxiety, lingering below the surface, that the joke cycle helps people deal with".[26]

Jokes often depend on the humour of the unexpected, the mildly taboo (which can include the distasteful or socially improper), or playing off stereotypes and other cultural beliefs. Many jokes fit into more than one category.

Political jokes are usually a form of satire. They generally concern politicians and heads of state, but may also cover the absurdities of a country's political situation. A prominent example of political jokes would be political cartoons. Two large categories of this type of jokes exist. The first one makes fun of a negative attitude to political opponents or to politicians in general. The second one makes fun of political clichés, mottos, catch phrases or simply blunders of politicians. Some, especially the you have two cows genre, derive humour from comparing different political systems.

Professional humour includes caricatured portrayals of certain professions such as lawyers, and in-jokes told by professionals to each other.

For example, the British tell jokes starting "An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman..." which exploit the supposed parsimony of the Scot, stupidity of the Irish, or some combination. Such jokes exist among numerous peoples.

Racially offensive humour is increasingly unacceptable, but there are similar jokes based on other stereotypes such as blonde jokes.

Religious jokes fall into several categories:

Jokes based on stereotypes associated with people of religion (e.g. nun jokes, priest jokes, or rabbi jokes)

Self-deprecating or self-effacing humour is superficially similar to racial and stereotype jokes, but involves the targets laughing at themselves. It is said to maintain a sense of perspective and to be powerful in defusing confrontations. Probably the best-known and most common example is Jewish humour. The egalitarian tradition was strong among the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe in which the powerful were often mocked subtly. Prominent members of the community were kidded during social gatherings, part a good-natured tradition of humour as a leveling device. A similar situation exists in the Scandinavian "Ole and Lena" joke.

Self-deprecating humour has also been used by politicians, who recognize its ability to acknowledge controversial issues and steal the punch of criticism - for example, when Abraham Lincoln was accused of being two-faced he replied, "If I had two faces, do you think this is the one I’d be wearing?".

The question / answer joke, sometimes posed as a common riddle, has a supposedly straight question and an answer which is twisted for humorous effect; puns are often employed. Of this type are knock-knock joke, light bulb joke, the many variations on "why did the chicken cross the road?", and the class of "What's the difference between..." joke, where the punch line is often a pun or a spoonerism linking two apparently entirely unconnected concepts.

Some jokes require a double act, where one respondent (usually the straight man) can be relied on to give the correct response to the person telling the joke. This is more common in performance than informal joke-telling.

A shaggy dog story is an extremely long and involved joke with an intentionally weak or completely non-existent punchline. The humour lies in building up the audience's anticipation and then letting them down completely. The longer the story can continue without the audience realising it is a joke, and not a serious anecdote, the more successful it is. Shaggy jokes appear to date from the 1930s, although there are several competing variants for the "original" shaggy dog story. According to one, an advertisement is placed in a newspaper, searching for the shaggiest dog in the world. The teller of the joke then relates the story of the search for the shaggiest dog in extreme and exaggerated detail (flying around the world, climbing mountains, fending off sabre-toothed tigers, etc); a good teller will be able to stretch the story out to over half an hour. When the winning dog is finally presented, the advertiser takes a look at the dog and states: "I don't think he's so shaggy."

Abadi, M. (1982). Some remarks on the theory of the joke: Revista de Psicoanalisis Vol 39(5) 1982, 707-720.

Albrecht, R. (1986). "Have you heard the one about...?": Four weeks of jokes in BILD during the 1980 election campaign: A communications typological investigation of jokes in the media of the Federal Republic of Germany: Communications Vol 12(1) 1986, 67-90.

Alford, K. F. (1980). Who are you kidding? The meaning and structure of joking relationships: Dissertation Abstracts International.

Baron-Cohen, S. (1997). Hey! It was just a joke! Understanding propositions and propositional attitudes by normally developing children and children with autism: Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences Vol 34(3) 1997, 174-178.

Bubel, C. M., & Spitz, A. (2006). "One of the last vestiges of gender bias": The characterization of women through the telling of dirty jokes in Ally McBeal: Humor: International Journal of Humor Research Vol 19(1) 2006, 71-104.

Burns, T. A. (1973). A joke and its tellers: A study of the functional variation of a folklore item at the psychological level. (Volumes I-VI): Dissertation Abstracts International Vol.

Kuipers, G. (2000). The difference between a Surinamese and a Turk: Ethnic jokes and the position of ethnic minorities in the Netherlands: Humor: International Journal of Humor Research Vol 13(2) 2000, 141-175.

Sullivan, K., Winner, E., & Hopfield, N. (1995). How children tell a lie from a joke: The role of second-order mental state attributions: British Journal of Developmental Psychology Vol 13(2) Jun 1995, 191-204.